Global Agenda Councils

The World’s Foremost Knowledge Network

The World Economic Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils is the world’s foremost interdisciplinary knowledge network dedicated to promoting innovative thinking on critical global issues, regions and industries, and incubating projects, campaigns and events for the public good.

The Network convenes the most relevant and knowledgeable thought leaders from academia, government, business and civil society to challenge conventional thinking, develop new insights and create innovative solutions for key global challenges. In a global environment marked by short-term orientation and siloed thinking, the Network fosters interdisciplinary and long-range thinking on the prevailing challenges on the global agenda.

The Network: Connecting the Dots

One of the unique features of the Network is the emphasis on exploring interlinkages between issue areas. Currently made up of 80 individual Councils and six Metacouncils, the Network of Global Agenda Councils attempts to collapse boundaries between subjects to examine and leverage critical interconnections. There are four types of Councils:

The Outlook on the Global Agenda is the flagship publication of the Network of Global Agenda Councils. The report provides a top-of-mind perspective from our councils members on the challenges and opportunities of the coming 12–18 months. It offers a comprehensive overview of the world, drawing upon the foremost global intelligence network and its collective brainpower to explore the most important issues we all face in the coming year.

Members of the Network meet annually at the Summit on the Global Agenda in the United Arab Emirates and virtually several times a year to monitor trends, identify global risks, discuss ideas and explore interconnections between issues. They also develop recommendations and integrate findings into World Economic Forum activities such as the Annual Meeting in Davos and regional and industry events, as well as into global decision-making processes.

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In the run up to our Summit on the Global Agenda, we asked you to put your questions to Jay Cziraky, from our Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade & Organized Crime.Untaxed and unregulated: what are your questions about the state of the shadow economy, and government efforts to drag it into the light?

Questions from our Facebook followers:

Raymond von Tamiarello: If the government wished to stop the dark side, couldn’t they just stop the paper money, and make every single payment nominal?

In the run up to our Summit on the Global Agenda, we asked you to put your questions to Ashish Thakkar, from our Global Agenda Council on Africa. African growth is expected to accelerate to almost 6% by 2015. What are the lessons we can learn from the way Africa is growing?

Questions from our Facebook followers:

Gwen Bst: Well, an expected growth of 6% is amazing if you take it at face value, but for a lot of African countries the growth is not so huge. Take Senegal, for example. The expected growth is 4% for this year (according to the IMF), but the population ...

Over the past three to four years we’ve seen extreme weather events happening more frequently and more intensely in a growing number of countries. That is one reason why people have woken up to the very real threat of climate change.

Climate change only comes fifth in the list of the top 10 trends facing the world this year. That’s not due to climate scepticism, which is now less pervasive than it used to be. It is fifth because the consequences of insufficient action are still underestimated. If we understood them properly, climate change would top the list. Because the fact is ...

The world has finally woken up to the problem of persistent structural unemployment. There is now a widespread understanding that, unless we address this chronic lack of jobs, we will see an escalation in social unrest. People need to be productively employed or crime rates go up, economies stagnate and our entire social fabric unravels.

The fact that governments and businesses are realizing this gives me reason to be optimistic, particularly in the West. The latest Pew research shows that the lack of employment opportunities consistently comes out top when people in North ...

Switch on the news and you see record-breaking protests, historic uprisings and riots on once-calm streets – there’s no doubt that the contents of people’s pay slips are becoming an issue of central importance. And the world wants to know more about it; the Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014 showed that of all the top 10 challenges, respondents were least happy with media coverage of income disparity.

The widening gap affects every part of our lives. It weakens social stability within countries and threatens security on a global scale. Looking ahead to 2014, it’s essential that we ...